The crowd is noisy if not rowdy as the first support, Hot Little Hands, takes the stage. They are Tim Harvey from Clare’s band The Feeding Set plus his brother James. They’re pretty nondescript boys, save for the shiny Egyptian-style cardboard headgear that makes them look like Harvey Birdman fanatics escaped from the comic book store.
Scene of the Crime, as heard on Triple J, gets an airing along with Dynamite, which Tim says he wrote for our headliner’s wedding. From the start, we get the gist that the gig will be full of song tributes and musical back-slapping. “I’ve got a feeling that something beautiful is going to happen between me and you,” they sing to each other, not to us.
Old Man River is not an old man, nor a waterway. He is modest and charming, and bobbing his mass of fuzzy brown hair, this modern-day Napoleon Dynamite leads the crowd in an old-fashioned sing-a-long. “I’m going to sing some songs for you,” he informs the crowd. “Tell me when you’ve had enough, ok? Just tell me when to stop.”
“To get rid of footprints, you just have to sit and be still,” he sings. The audience at the sold-out Zoo tonight has nowhere to sit nor any desire to be still. They rush at the bar as Old Man River leaves the stage, priming themselves for the main act.
Clare Bowditch is a simple girl. She bows to some rock n roll conventions – Fitzroy shoes and lipstick “all on straight” – but you can tell she’d rather be singing to us in her living room. To her credit, she tries to make it an intimate show, stripping back her songs to just guitar, vocals and piano.
She gets Divorcee by 23 out of the way early, as if to show she’s put her breakthrough track to bed and is ready to move on with her life. And you’d hope so, since she just gave birth to identical twins, adding to Asha, the first child she had with husband Marty. Marty plays drums The Feeding Set, which knits together her home and creative life neatly.
Her sparse pop songs may have been filled out in her new album The Moon Looked On but her folk roots still show and her love for a good yarn shines through in the longer-than-usual banter between songs. At one point, while raving about a trip to Mexico, she stops and harangues a crowd member. “Are you filming? I wish you were filming because it’s a really good story. You thought you were going to get in trouble then, didn’t you? Come on! It’s the new age!” The story involves a “sacred” pilgrimage to the Corona factory and cartoonesque incongruities in time and space. You get the impression whatever wavelength Clare Bowditch inhabits, it’s far away from your average suburban mum’s.
She teaches the crowd the chorus to Lips Like Oranges (“I guess I was wondering / What you were doing on the weekend / I’ve got tickets to the show / It’s free you know”) and invites us to sing along. Just for fun, Bowditch ran a Winter Secrets singing competition, inviting singers from across Australia to audition for the chance to sing on stage with her. Brisbane’s winner Pascal is invited onto the stage. She is a five-foot-nothing Italian but with a shock of curly red hair that glows under the stage lights. She accompanies Bowditch on the Rowland and backup vocals for a flawless but lacklustre Your Other Hand. The crowd applauds politely as Pascal disappears and Clare steps up to the mic. “It’s time for something a little bit different. A little bit wild.”
Offstage for less than a minute, Bowditch reappears with her hair in a loose bun atop her head and wraparound Ray Bans. As she introduces us to her “poo brown casio”, you can imagine it’s what she looked like aged 8 after raiding the dressup closet for a living room concert.
Save for the front rows, you get the impression most of the audience is there because it’s a nice way to spend a Saturday night. They chat amongst themselves and clink glass bottles. At one point, Bowditch says it’s nice to have “a little bit of noise” but the volume drops when she sings The Thing About Grief, a tribute to her sister who died when she was five.
“The thing about grief is / Few people know if the i goes before the e / And it’s hard to give away / Because it’s the last thing you gave to me.”
She clearly feels deeply but she seems to live plainly, singing about cups of tea and toast, the kids and the sunshine. Tim Harvey returns to the stage for You Look So Good, the opening track from Clare’s new album; which is a sweet, honest tribute, presumably to her husband. It shows a strong, forthright and surprisingly well-adjusted young woman in love with her life.
Later, she invites Old Man River, the rest of Hot Little Hands, Pascal and local songwriter Andrew Morris to the stage for a version of Paul Kelly’s From Little Things, Big Things Grow. Pascal stuffs up halfway through her verse and never quite recovers, showing she has a way to go before she can join the headliner’s league. But then, from little things…
The sunglasses reappear in the encore for a rollicking version of I Got You Babe with Old Man River. This time, it was Bowditch who stumbles in the bridge, when she channels Sonny Bono at the same time the Old Man launches in. “Fuck, I’m always taking the male part,” she jokes. Apparently, she forgot all the words to Lips Like Oranges in Adelaide two weeks ago but saw a fan mouthing the words in the audience. So she pulled the girl, Angela, up on stage and asked her to sing while she played guitar. She seems at her best when performing at the seat of her pants.
Bowditch is unflappable and a consummate performer. She seems like a woman prepared for what life has to offer her and takes it all in her stride. Like she sings in I Am Not Allowed : “I want a life that doesn’t / Radio for help all of the time.”
